By the mid-2000s both academics and central banks had come to a remarkable consensus on what central banks’ basic strategy should be. However with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 the world of central banking changed forever. The worldwide financial crisis revealed that some of the ...

Policymakers and academics often believe that large capital inflows are associated with booms in asset prices and therefore with a higher risk of financial crisis. The belief is supported by the theoretical works of Krugman (1998) Caballero and Krishnamurthy (2006) Aoki Benigno and Kiyotaki (2009) ...

On September 2008 Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and the world became aware that the financial crisis that had been unfolding for months was far more serious than expected. Months later it became clear that the financial crisis of 2008-2009 was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression ...

Commodity prices have experienced significant swings over the past two decades. Real commodity prices have on average more than doubled in the last decade compared to the previous one while the prices of some commodities such as copper and other industrial metals have more than tripled in real terms. ...

Structural transformation is a reallocation of labor across sectors. In this paper I investigate the impact of structural transformation in an open economy on sectoral and aggregate productivity with a particular focus on the role of government. While there are potentially many sources of structural ...

Economies in which the extraction of a non-renewable natural resource is a significant activity pose two distinctive challenges for economic policy: Revenues are likely to fluctuate because commodity prices have historically been volatile. Furthermore the revenue from extraction is generated by depleting ...

The securitization boom in the United States mortgage market from 2000 to 2005 was enormous (figure 1). According to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) new issuance of securities backed by mortgages that were not insured by the U.S. government rose by a factor of twelve ...

Our earlier work has helped to switch the focus of studies of extreme capital flow movements toward the use of data on gross inflows (mainly driven by foreigners) and outflows (mainly driven by domestics) rather than relying on net flows (the sum of the two) (Forbes and Warnock 2012). The old focus ...

Events in financial markets before and during the crisis of late 2008 have stimulated renewed interest in modeling trade with asymmetric information. Robert Shimer’s contribution to this volume joins the literature focusing on trade in securities that are claims on mortgages where issuers of the ...

A characteristic of the current crisis in Europe is that countries in its periphery have found themselves increasingly cut off from international financial markets. In the present study we ask how such changes in the financial structure influence the welfare consequences of maintaining a fixed exchange ...